Music | Interview with The Jacques

While artists and press alike clamber over themselves to announce “guitar music is dead”, there’s a single outfit of lads directly proving how ludicrous this statement is; the punk-spitting, britpop-boasting band about to dominate and redefine indie: The Jacques. Having bagged themselves a slot at last year’s Hyde Park celebrations, a debut EP – Pretty DJ – released at the back end of 2014, and a signage to Gary Powell’s [Libertines] label, it seems this rough-and-ready band have all the components in place to explode into the mainstream.

I had the honour of finding out what makes The Jacques special, how they secured that Hyde Park gig, and which famous faces they’d like to accompany them on a pub crawl…

What makes The Jacques different to the other bands riding the indie wave?

I don’t think many of them value poetry in their lyrics enough anymore, and there seems to be much less mess involved nowadays.

With The Jacques being a band of brothers, how difficult is it to get your heads down to serious music making?

I don’t think that makes a difference. If anything, it helped before, because we lived together. We never really ‘knuckle down’ as such anyway, these things just happen.

NME have likened the band to a “pre-pubescent Pete Doherty fronting Echobelly”. For readers who have yet to discover you, how would you personally describe the group’s sound?

Cherubs with Stratocasters?

In five years’ time, where do you aspire to be?

In London, making just about enough money to have the time of our lives.

You played the same bill as The Libertines at Hyde Park 2014 and are signed to 25 Hour Convenience Store, Gary Powell’s [The Libertines] record label. How did these two opportunities come about?

Knowing the right people. We’re very lucky. These things all link up; you meet someone at a gig who gives you a gig, to which someone important shows up. That sort of thing.

Your debut EP, Pretty DJ EP, came out in November 2014 and features four songs. What are the inspirations residing behind each track?

The songs aren’t very different from one another, so talking about them as an entity makes sense. They are really just a tease at the current music scene, a bit of a nod to what rock n’ roll once was and what it could be in the next few years. We always laugh when they’re called ‘straight-up teenage love songs’ or something alike. They are very much sugar-coated things.

As your fan base rapidly grows, what can we expect release-wise from the band in 2015?

We’ve got an EP out in June.

Pub crawl: if you were to organise a booze-up with five famous faces, who would be on the guestlist?

The blokes from Jurassic 5. Assuming there’s 5 of them…

And finally, do you have any advice for budding musicians aiming to get signed by a prestigious label?

Yeah, but wouldn’t really be valuable because that hasn’t happened to us yet. Just make the music that you want to make; it’s like art, when people make art that looks too much like art, it always comes out really naff